Wednesday, January 18, 2017

As you know, Freud was in the business of interpreting. He told
people what it all meant. Or, what it appeared to mean. The meaning of life,
the meaning of death, the meaning of the universe… whatever it was, Freud
claimed to know what it meant.

Invariably, the meaning was all about desire. Freud knew
what people really, really wanted. This implies, of course, that he could read
minds. Why would he know better than you what you wanted?

As it happens, your desire is not an objective fact. You
cannot determine empirically, on the basis of evidence, that you want an ice
cream cone or a trip to Tahiti. And even if you are persuaded that you know
what you want, no one else can really claim to have any objective knowledge of
your desire… beyond what you tell him.

You sense that you want this and not that. You act on your sense
impression, but that is not the same as knowing, for example, that a cat is on
a mat. The latter can be determined objectively. Your desire cannot.

One thing we know about desire is that if you have something
you cannot want it. By definition. Wanting something means not having it. You can
say that you wish you were anywhere but where you are right now, but you cannot
say, in English, that you wish you were where you are. It makes no sense. No
one uses such sentences.

No fact proves that you desire something. Just because you
do not have a carpet in your hallway does not mean that you want to carpet the
hallway.

Nowadays, as the emotionally overwrought have lit upon the
notion that the incoming president has no relationship with facts, one feels
constrained to note that the outgoing president has never let himself be
constrained by fact or by constitutional law or by loyalty to America.

If one can argue cogently that the incoming president is not
qualified for the office he is about to assume, what mind warp can possibly
make it that the outgoing president was even remotely qualified for the office
of the presidency.

In a fact-free world, Obama was supremely qualified, his
presidency was a rousing success and Hillary Clinton was the most qualified
candidate for the presidency… ever. In a fact-free world you can say what you
want and then force people to believe it all… as a higher truth. What matters is not what is true but what you want to be true.

During the Obama years America took leave of fact. Now, with
the incoming Trump administration, Americans are rediscovering facts.

You know which ones. Take the fact that tells us,
biologically, based on chromosomes, that Bradley Manning is a male. It’s a
fact. And yet, Manning believes that he is a she and if you deny the fact you
are a bigot. And now, our fact-challenged president, reverting to the kind of
thinking that caused him to spend two decades lapping up the hate-filled swill
issuing from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has decided that Manning’s betrayal of
America was no big deal.

Is it a fact that no one died as a result of Manning’s
treason? The New York Times says so. Thus, you can ignore the fact that terrorists the
world over pored through the documents that Manning leaked and exacted revenge on anyone who remotely resembled the people described therein. It’s
a fact.

Freud liked to pretend that his interpretations could be
proved or disproved. Early in his career he claimed that if hysterics said that
they desired X and then obtained X, and if they were not satisfied with X that meant
that they did not know what they wanted. Thus, they were neurotic and needed
psychoanalysis.

One must mention again that this is grossly disrespectful to women,
but it is also a seducer’s ploy. If a seducer can persuade a woman that she
does not know what she wants, he is on the road to convincing her that she
wants him, only she does not know it. That is the point of psychoanalysis.

Later, Freud declared that if his interpretation elicited a
patient’s memory or fantasy, that piece of psychic data confirmed that he was
right. Later, Karl Popper argued
persuasively that Freud would not accept the existence of a fact that could
disprove his interpretations or his theories. Ergo, that he was not doing
science but was trafficking in an ideology. He was not transmitting knowledge
but was running a polemic. One whose goal was to persuade you to believe something—most
often, a narrative—that made no sense.

But, what happens when we examine Freud’s practice through the theories of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky, especially their
theories of confirmation bias. One mentions in passing that those who claim
that the K/T theories show that we are more irrational than we think we are
should be careful lest they end up throwing out the Enlightenment. Today’s
world is not running short on irrational thinking, so let’s not encourage this
bad habit.

Confirmation
bias comes from when you have an interpretation, and you adopt it, and then,
top down, you force everything to fit that interpretation,” Kahneman says.
“That’s a process that we know occurs in perception that resolves ambiguity,
and it’s highly plausible that a similar process occurs in thinking.

At that point you can kiss psychoanalysis good-bye. It
becomes an orgy of confirmation bias. The truth is, that a patient in psychoanalysis-- like many patients in less
rigorous and less orthodox treatments-- develops a bias toward finding material
that will confirm whatever his therapist is selling.

On a more philosophical note, we can ask whether information
that confirms you bias is a fact. What do you think of the economic recovery? It’s a fact that the current unemployment
rate is below 5%. It’s also a fact that the workforce participation rate is as
low as it has been in four decades. If you only look at the first fact you will
be confirming your bias. The truth lies in the qualification offered by the
second fact.

We should ask this question: when is a fact not a fact? All
facts are not created equal. All facts do not have the same value. Any
prosecuting attorney can put together a bunch of facts to prove that Col.
Mustard killed Mrs. Peacock in the library with a candlestick. The police found
his fingerprint on the murder weapon and they know that he had good reason to
want her dead. The fingerprint is a fact. How it got there is speculation? What
it does or does not prove is a question.

Once you determine that Col. Mustard was out of the
country at the time of the murder, the fingerprint remains a fact. It is no
longer a relevant fact. It appears to show something that it does not show.

So, when is a fact not a fact? The answer is: when it is an
appearance. When a datum appears to demonstrate something, to prove a point, to
confirm your bias… it may or may not be a fact. That is, it may or may not
prove the point that you want it to prove. It might appear to do so, but that does
not mean that it necessarily does so.

One understands that the intellectual tradition called
Western idealism is based on appearances. Plato did not believe that you could
ever have objective knowledge of real objects. Despite what some people persist in
thinking you cannot produce scientific thought out of Plato’s theories.

Later idealists believed that we could only know things as
they appeared to us, as we processed appearances. Our knowledge was limited to what
came to be known as phenomena. Beginning with Kant, those who believe in
phenomena tell us that we never really see things as they are. We only see
things as they appear to us. Or else, Nietzsche declared that there are no
facts. There are only interpretations.

This implies, to the minds of idealistic philosophers, that
we can change the world if we learn to think differently or if we rid our minds
of bias. We can never really know what is. We can only know how things appear
to us.

Thus, the world is overrun with thought police who want to teach
you the correct way to see the real world. Examine the following case. During
the Obama years, the president’s home town, led by one of his most stalwart
allies, became a killing field. The murder rate spiked. The incidence of gun violence spiked. What percentage of those crimes have been
black-on-black? Probably the number is well over 90%. How does the Obama
Justice Department deal with the problem? You guessed it, by issuing a report about
racial animus on the part of the Chicago police department.
Thus, with one fell swoop it exonerates those who have committed
murder and mayhem… and has blamed it all on the police.

As K/T and Popper and others have been at pains to point
out, empirical science does not begin with bias. It does not even begin with a narrative
or a theory. It begins by collecting the facts, the data. Then it formulates a
hypothesis and, if it wants to do science, creates an experiment to test it. It
must, Richard Feynman insisted, report all the facts, those that would tend to
confirm the hypothesis and those that would disprove it. Then you can evaluate
the hypothesis on a rational basis, on the basis of the evidence. If there is
no such thing as a fact that can disprove your bias, you are within the
tradition of Western idealism. If you allow the facts to challenge and to disprove
your theories, you are engaging in rational thought and are using the
scientific method.

11 comments:

Confirmation bias is a phenomenon well-known to accident investigators. It may have played a key part in that accident in which a regional jet attempted to take off from the wrong runway, which was way too short. The First Officer had mentioned to the Captain that he had observed "lights are out all over the place" when landing at the airport the previous day. This may have led both of them to discount the dark runway environment rather than questioning it.

HYPOTHESIS: We are on Runway 22DATA: The runway lights are outDATA PROCESSING VIA CONFIRMATION BIAS: They must be out because of that maintenance or electrical problem that the FO observed yesterday.

Your citation of K&T is interesting here. Their data are among the most misunderstood in cognitive psychology.

For example, the famous "loss aversion" graph, purported to show that individuals are "irrational" investors because their choices do not fall on a line with slope=1.0. There is nothing either rational or irrational about that particular line, except that it happens to be one of the assumptions in quantitative economic theory. It is perfectly reasonable and rational that a person might choose to avoid losses they cannot afford over gains that will not materially better their lot in life.

Confirmation bias is "irrational" when it arrives at a conclusion with which an observer disagrees, and inductive reasoning when it arrives at a conclusion with which the observer does agree. In fact, courts of law exist to debate two different, opposite, instances of confirmation bias in every trial under the rules of evidence.

Stuart: One thing we know about desire is that if you have something you cannot want it. By definition. Wanting something means not having it.

I object to this definition, although maybe it comes down to the definition of "have" which may require action or effort. Wanting things you can't easily get is certainly problematic, while wanting things you can possess simply by asking or easy effort is quite sensible.

So wanting something could be said to be about personal agency. A plant in dry soil that "wants" water has to wait for rain, while an animal can just hop over to a stream or puddle close by.

A cautious animal might think he has to sit by the stream all day, just in case he gets thirsty, while a more adventurous one will feel safe he can come back any time he's thirsty, and not need to possess access to the stream continually.

I do agree that "desire" is most tricky when you can't possess what you think you want. If you have agency, you can imagine what you want, and work towards it, and then reflect if it meet the need or not, and reassess. But if you don't have agency, you might spend a lifetime wanting something you can't have, and never realize it wouldn't meet your need anyway. Of course sometimes thought experiments can replace action in the world, and imagine you already have it, and see what has changed.

Usually when we "want" something we're focused on what is lacking in us, and don't think about the less-wanted consequences of having are. Materialism can be like that, like having the perfect house for hosting parties, while you're too busy working to keep up the payments on your mortgage and credit cards. Real agency wouldn't demand future labor pay for present needs.

Anyway, I'm not convinced Freud believed he was a mind-reader, or at least that he wsa sure he was always right. Maybe Carl Jung was more humble, like dream analysis, Jung accepted dreams could have many interpretations, and many levels of meaning, including literal ones. So it is all subjective, and takes trial and error and even then its not immediately clear which strategies are good ones and which ones put us one step further down a road to hell.

And Freud was also smart enough to know that we all have an inner tyrant, that 2-year old persona who thinks other people exist to meet our needs, and acting badly when the evidence suggests otherwise. So its better to see needs or desires as "our problem", and not make other people responsible for fulfilling them involuntarily. OTOH, social duty is real, even if also subjective, and agreements between people surely are what makes families and society function at all.

And when needs are unmet, like for years, people will often get drastic, and do crazy things, like voting for Donald Trump, just in case their personal agency can be improved by a distractable bully leading the most powerful country in the world.

Stuart: Anyway, New York Magazine defined confirmation bias: Confirmation bias comes from when you have an interpretation, and you adopt it, and then, top down, you force everything to fit that interpretation,” Kahneman says. “That’s a process that we know occurs in perception that resolves ambiguity, and it’s highly plausible that a similar process occurs in thinking.

This looks like tge general problems of all ideology. If there is only one "correct" interpretatation (objective reality), but reality is too complex to be describeable by any single model, then a person who needs the certainty of understanding will prefer to replace reality with his model, and only pay attention to apparent facts that confirm, and neglect the evidence that threatens the model.

Iain McGilchrist expressed this in his talk of our "Divided brain", where right brain thinking tends to look for the exceptions, while left-brain thinking reinforces the model.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI RSA ANIMATE: The Divided Brain

I'm sure I get caught by confirmation bias at least as much as anyone else, at least in things I'd prefer be settled, because life is impossible without some assumptions of what's real. If you had to debate every aspect of physical law every time you needed to convince someone else of reality of a given danger, you would pull your hair out in exasperation.

And that's why tribalism is so powerful, because we'd all prefer the "confirmation bias" of our own echo chambers to not discuss inconvenient truths that threaten our ability to be oblivious about things we don't want to deal with.

My own approach to this is to call myself "agnostic", especially about religious dogma, but also in general. Still I'm with the aetheists when I say I'm not agnostic about Russell's teapot circling the sun. It seems too improbably to contemplate, even if I use "confirmation bias" of my culture to avoid the possibility.

I remember when I was younger, I had an excellent theory that every time I learn a new fact, I ought to see how that fact affects every other assumed fact, or speculative interpretation of reality, and then I could be pure - I'd never have to worry about cognitive dissonance, because I'd have cleared away the contradictions long ago.

But apparently human brains can't do this, or not individually. Science can try, and even there, it usually takes the last generation of scientists to die before the new scientific facts become integrated and the old assumptions banished. Of course, propaganda, tribalistic needs and confirmation bias can cause "new science" to be build on different false assumptions, and the old dead scientists might have been right to resist the new fangled nonsense.

E.F. Schumacher called this "fake" science as "materialistic scientism", and he worried that its "materialistic focus" was throwing away deeper truths of existence that objective evidence can't measure. He separates science between "instructional science" of repeatable experiments, and "observational science" that described the world without presuming understanding of the hidden inner experience of its beings.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed#Critique_of_materialistic_scientism

Certainly psychology ought to be primarily internal, at best descriptive, although behaviorists were able to show otherwise, and that if you can control experiments sufficiently, free will, and individual agency can be replaced by the will of the scientists setting up the framework of possible action. Schumacher used the "chain of being" to put a framework of agency and free will above dead scientific loaw.

"And when needs are unmet, like for years, people will often get drastic, and do crazy things, like voting for Donald Trump, just in case their personal agency can be improved by a distractable bully leading the most powerful country in the world."

Perhaps something "drastic..and..crazy" wasn't anything like what you're describing. Perhaps it was voting AGAINST rather than voting FOR. Perhaps it had nothing to do with drastic OR crazy and was simply the desire to try a new hypothesis. Perhaps, rather than drastic and crazy, it was patriotic and fed up.

Everyone who voted (for the Bully as you called him) was trying to improve "personal agency" and had just survived eight years of having their "free will.....replaced by the will of the scientists setting up the framework of possible action". Perhaps they just said, as they do in Exploding Kittens, NOPE.

Anonymous said... Perhaps something "drastic..and..crazy" wasn't anything like what you're describing. Perhaps it was voting AGAINST rather than voting FOR. Perhaps it had nothing to do with drastic OR crazy and was simply the desire to try a new hypothesis. Perhaps, rather than drastic and crazy, it was patriotic and fed up.

I'm certainly open that many people voted for Trump because they didn't want Clinton. I'm sure my state of Minnesota Republicans saw it that way, especially given Republicans haven't won Minnesota since Nixon '72.

So now the next step is to build the case for impeachment, either by letting Trump be himself, OR provoking him into breaking the law and using that against him.

Technicalities are fine, while I'm open to him shooting someone on 5th avenue, if someone wants to take the fall. Trump might have bad aim.

Anyway, I hope we work though this relatively quickly, and maybe we'll have President Pence in 6 months, if Pence plays things right and stays out of harm's way.

And then we'll be left merely with a divided GOP to collapse under their own division over the next 2 and 4 years.

It really is hard to imagine what the worst case is, while GWB obviously sets the standard, two wars funded on a tax cut, and he had to start an unnecessary war to get his second 4 years to show what a terrible president he was.

Reread the last line of the original article: "If you allow the facts to challenge and to disprove your theories, you are engaging in rational thought and are using the scientific method."

Sad that for all your highfalutin postulations, theories and ramblings, you resort to inane, sophomoric solutions to what you don't find acceptable. Impeachment? Guns and shooting? Surely it would have been offensive to you if I offered those same solutions to show my distaste for your candidate, assuming that ze/she/it/zhei (whatever) had been elected.

I have noticed that phenomenon, checked the facts and dismissed. However, I must thank you for the heads up and implied support. It really just boils down to how long you want to spend finding data to support your 'facts', doesn't it?

I used to be a die hard liberal, but changed my mind when the facts of my life presented themselves. Difficult to change one's stripes, but certainly not impossible. Most important is to admit that you don't know what you don't know and then, depending on the issue's importance in your life, committing the time to learn.

In that regard, I thank Stuart for his posts - always thought provoking - which force me to pay attention to the detail and to question myself.